Neighbourhood Café Blind Tasting at Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 26 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/660

Some events announce themselves with fanfare and a full programme; others arrive like a well-kept secret, all raised eyebrow and quiet confidence. Session 76 at Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 was firmly the latter — a blind tasting hosted by Neighbourhood Café, with surprise guests, food aplenty, and a venue change that only added to the sense of occasion. When the doors of the Duke of York on Commercial Court swung open that July evening, nobody was entirely sure what they were walking into. That, it turned out, was rather the point.

About This Event

VENUE CHANGE: THIS EVENT WILL NOW BE HELD IN THE DUKE OF YORK

Surprise Guests join Neighbourhood Cafe tonight in what will be a blind tasting event. Do you trust us? Food and Drinks galore. We might even drop hints closer to the time... or not...

Looking Back

The last-minute shift to the Duke of York could have rattled nerves, but in practice it felt like fate had made the booking. This storied Cathedral Quarter pub, with its walls papered in vintage photographs and its long tradition of good Irish whiskey, set exactly the right tone for an evening built on mystery and trust. The low light, the hum of conversation, the clatter of glasses — it was the kind of atmosphere that makes uisce beatha taste just a little more complex than it would anywhere else. The duchas of the place seeped into the event and made it its own.

Neighbourhood Café brought their customary warmth and culinary curiosity to the evening. Known for thoughtful food and an unpretentious approach to flavour, they were the ideal hosts for a format that asked attendees to set aside their assumptions and simply experience what was in the glass. The food pairings were generous and well-considered — not afterthoughts, but genuine partners to the whiskey, each course chosen to open up or reframe what came before it. This wasn't drinks with nibbles; it was a meal with intent.

The blind tasting format itself was a masterstroke. Without labels to anchor expectations, guests were free to discover what they actually tasted rather than what they thought they should. There were knowing nods across tables, the occasional surprised laugh, and more than a few confident identifications that turned out to be delightfully wrong. Hints had been promised in the lead-up — and some arrived, others didn't — but by the time everyone was seated, that playful uncertainty had become part of the pleasure. Those who enjoy the deeper craft of distilling and blending might find similar intellectual rewards in a very different setting over at the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass, where provenance and process are laid bare rather than concealed.

The surprise guests, when revealed, rewarded the faith attendees had placed in the evening. Without spoiling the seanchas for anyone who might encounter a similar format in future, suffice to say the selection spanned styles and traditions in a way that rewarded open-mindedness. For those who came away wanting to trace the lineage of what they'd tasted, the Belfast Whiskey Week Whiskey Map is a fine place to follow threads further. And if the blind format left you hungry to explore one particular distillery's range with full transparency, the Bushmills New Cask Finish Range Introduction from a previous festival year offers exactly that kind of focused, illuminating deep-dive.

At £40, Session 76 offered something genuinely rare: an evening where the whiskey surprised you, the food held its own, and the venue felt chosen rather than merely available. Sláinte to Neighbourhood Café for having the confidence to ask their guests to trust them — and to everyone who did.